Friday, May 20, 2005

I took my seat.

The train out of King's Cross was unusually busy. I adopted my usual foolproof strategy for ensuring that nobody sits next to me - I opened my broadsheet newspaper wide, placed a smelly-looking sandwich on the table in front of me and adopted the facial expression of a yob.

An American embarked. I knew he was an American because he had a big hat. He sat next to me.

I quite like American people. I know there are some anti-Americans who might have a go at them for their foreign policy, not doing the Kyoto thing etc., but if I meet an American person I do not expect them to take me personally to task for Ben Elton. And the jury's still out as to which of these has the potential to cause more long-term misery and despair.

He introduced himself, as one does on trains. I politely did likewise before returning to my newspaper.

"Is there a washroom on the train?" he asked.

I put down my newspaper and struggled with this, before giving the honourable reply. "If you've just come from Heathrow," I advised, "I would hate for the first impression of our country's sanitation to be the toilets on WAGN."

Once more I lifted my newspaper, this time in an extremely exaggerated 'look, I am reading my newspaper' type fashion.

He took this in good spirits and began asking me things. It was pointless to resist.

He was from Arizona, which made him a proper American, not like those plastic ones that you see on 'Friends' and stuff. I explained that I'd always wanted to visit Arizona when I was a kid, because it sounded quite exciting, what with having a 'Z' in it. (This was before I visited Ashby-de-la-Zouch).

"Are we still in London, or is that an English village?" he asked (word-for-word) as we sped through Knebworth.

"And what are those?"

I spent ten minutes giving an interesting historical lecture on the English allotment movement, from wartime to present day.

"And that? Wow, that is lush."

I glowed with pride.

"It's a bowling green."

"A what?"

"A bowling green. Do you not play bowls in America? Like... lawn bowls? Where you have to get each bowling ball closest to the white ball?"